ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses life history of Anna Julia Cooper, a feminist thinker. Cooper was an educator and an activist, an historian and a linguist, a writer on subjects from racism and sexism to literature and education. Her first book, A Voice from the South, was written in 1892, a time, she emphasizes, when "The race is just twenty-one years removed from the conception and experience of a chattel"; her dissertation was defended in 1925, and she lived to see the Civil Rights Movement. Her vision is of a world where it is safe for everyone to be weak and peaceful and caring, but where the internal and external resources to be fully developed are readily available. This ideal invigorates the writings of the young and the old Cooper, in multiple genres. Cooper is a believer in the 'individual soul, capable of eternal growth and unlimited development', a 'soul with unquenchable longings and inexhaustible possibilities'.
